Isabelle

"That story grows wilder every time she tells it... "

photographer unknown

"Gee, she looks fierce" my daughter says.

          Her dark face grimaces from sepia,
          a ragged grin, she's encased in Sunday best
          black, brimmed hat, square, sensible shoes.
          Her daughter holds her youngest child.

"That's my Aunt Isabelle," I tell her as she recoils.
"Oh," she says. I can feel her pull inward.

          She doesn't remember how Isabelle cradled her,           
          warning that the carpet was too dirty for her to crawl.
          A garish polyester quilt shocked her father's sensibilities.
          But Isabelle downplayed her generosity,
          "It's just something to throw on the floor for her to play."

"She is such a slob," my sister jeers,
"Why couldn't she at least dress up for mom's funeral?"

         Aunt Izzy hobbles on a cane, greeting mourners,
         that ragged grin wry and wise, knowing
         where my mother's soul will finally rest.
         She knew too well the pain of death, 
         her son riding a motorcycle at sixteen.
         The memory still shadows her eyes.

"It's a postcard from Izzy." Dad reads how his sister discovered
the restaurant toilet outside the backdoor in an Eastern European town.
Postcards filled a shoebox with tales of her adventures around the world.

"That story grows wilder every time she tells it," Uncle Harvey howls to this day.

        She explained her dark coloring by telling 
        of a grandmother's rape
        in an Iowa cornfield by someone passing by.
        He morphs from Cherokee chief to circus roustabout.
        It may have been the boy from the neighboring farm.

Even when the family lived in a mink barn, there was always a piano.
Their poverty was so much different from Mom's family,
where joy was sparse.

        Isabelle's gabled and gardened house sheltered 
        family and friends. I remember a barbeque there,
        all my cousins, the old ones laughing out loud.

Vagrants warmed themselves in her vacant house after she died,
burning sheets of genealogy that traced us back to Scottish lairds.

You can read more from Sue Cauhape on her page, “Ring Around the Basin”:

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